Coming to America -- Uncle Joe and Candid Camera

Do you remember this catchy little theme song?

When it's least expected - you're elected. You're the star today
Smile! You're on Candid Camera!
With a hocus-pocus - you're in focus. It's your lucky day
Smile! You're on Candid Camera!

It's fun to laugh at yourself. It's a tonic, tried and true.
It's fun to laugh at yourself as other people do.

How's your sense of humor? There's a rumor: Laughter's on its way.
Smile! You're on Candid Camera! Smile! You're on Candid Camera!

Candid Camera was a really popular show, one of the earliest reality shows, the premise of which was to catch people off guard "in the act of being themselves", as the show's creator, Allen Funt, claimed.

You may also remember Allen Funt's sidekick, Durward Kirby.

Durward Kirby appeared on Candid Camera between 1961 and 1966. I also remember him on the Garry Moore Show and the Carol Burnett Show.

I used to watch Candid Camera while we lived in Winnipeg. We had settled there in 1960 after leaving Trinidad and Jamaica. As I mentioned in my last post, we visited Uncle Joe for a few days en route from Jamaica to Canada. I didn't expect to see Uncle Joe again for quite some time, if at all, until one afternoon in 1964 when I saw him on Candid Camera. There were four vignettes on the half-hour show, and the last one was the one Uncle Joe was on. The set-up was this: Uncle Joe, whose job at the time apparently was to run errands, was called to an office in Manhattan. There, behind a screen, was a man who asked Joe to take his pants to the cleaners, and a pair of shoes to be shined. The trick to this sequence was that the pants had three legs. What Candid Camera wanted to elicit was Joe's reaction to this odd pair of pants.

Well, he looked the pants over carefully. The man behind the screen asked him to check the pockets to make sure nothing was left in them,

and that was when Uncle Joe realized that the pants not only had three back pockets, but had three legs! Uncle Joe, however, did not react right away. In answer to the comments by the man behind the screen he admired the cut and material of the pants, and even the colour, but he did comment that there were too many back pockets. Next the man asked Joe to take his shoes to be cleaned, and proceeded to pass three shoes over the top of the screen -- a left shoe, a right shoe and a middle shoe. Once again, Joe did not react. Then he was asked to call a number to speak to the man's wife, and of course, was connected to Candid Camera. He didn't seem to catch on then, until the man came from behind the screen and told him he was on Candid Camera.

Joe took it well. He laughed and said: "You know what the problem was? You had too many pockets!" And he smiled into the camera.

After I saw the show I wrote to Uncle Joe to ask him if it really was him on Candid Camera. He wrote back to assure me that it was indeed him, but he had a different take on his reaction to the skit, in comparison to comments made by Allen Funt. Funt stated that Joe just didn't want to believe what he was seeing, hence showed no reaction. According to Uncle Joe, he didn't want to embarrass the man who apparently had a pair of pants with three legs.

The last time we saw Uncle Joe was when he visited us in 1973. We were living in Burlington, Ontario by then and my parents had come up to visit us. Joe and Alice took a bus from New York to spend a few days in Burlington and so the brothers were united for the last time. Here they are, with Alice. You can see the strong family resemblance between my Dad and Uncle Joe.

The Watergate scandal was in the news while Joe and Alice were visiting us. I asked Uncle Joe what he thought of the affair and he got very excited about it. I don't know whether or not Uncle Joe was a Democrat, of if he had any political leanings, but he was highly incensed about Watergate and the part played by H. R. Haldenman and John Erlichman.

"Ehrlichman", he said. "Do you know what the name means in German? 'Ehrlich' means 'honest, honourable' ... 'Ehrlichman' means 'honourable man'!"

Uncle Joe died the next year in 1974 of liver failure. Alice, who was eleven years younger than Joe, lived for another thirty years, dying in April 2004 in a nursing home.

Coming to America -- My Surprising Uncle Joe

Joseph Dudley Levy was the youngest of the Levy family. He may have been the first one to leave Jamaica and go to New York, but I cannot be sure of this, as I have not so far been able to find any record of his brother, Leo's emigration, also to New York. As I mentioned in a previous post, Joe sailed from Port Antonio on board the ss Catherine Cuneo, on August 28th, 1917, and arrived at the Port of New York on September 4th. According to the ship's manifest he was age seventeen, and going to a Mrs. Warner, a friend, at 346 Summer Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. I have no idea who this Mrs. Warner might have been. Under the column "Name and complete address of nearest relative or friend in country whence alien came", Joe listed his mother, Mrs. Alice Levy, 22 Beeston Street, Kingston, Jamaica. Also on the first page of the manifest is a column headed "Race or People". It is typical of the mindset of the American authorities at that time that anyone coming from Jamaica was immediately labelled "African Black". Thus was my Uncle Joe labelled, yet at the same time he was described as fair complexion, with brown eyes and brown hair, and with a deformed right thumb.

What happened to him immediately after his arrival in New York is a mystery, as I have been unable to find him in the 1920 census. However, he does show up in the 1930 census for Manhattan, District 787, as a boarder in a household on 113th Street, headed by one Harry Petrous. It appears to have been some kind of tenement, and also in the same household were two of Joe's cousins, Adwin and Aaron Da Costa, the eldest and youngest sons of Alice's brother, Melbourne Rodrigues Da Costa. But now comes the curious part! For Joe is no longer Joseph Levy, but instead is calling himself Joseph Lavell, and in the column for birthplace he gives the information that he was born in Pennsylvania!

Here I must digress for a moment. I knew that Uncle Joe had changed his name to Lavell -- though whether or not he did it officially is not known. His rationale for doing this was that he would have faced discrimination in New York with a Jewish name, even though he was not Jewish but Catholic. I have a sneaky feeling that the name change may have had something to do with his eventual marriage, though at the time of the 1930 census he was listed as single, and in fact did not get married until 5 June 1937, but it's possible that he had already met his future wife, Alice Savitski, who interestingly enough, was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Was this why Joe claimed from then on to have been born there?

Joe applied for and received United States citizenship in November 1924. I am very grateful to a researcher in New York, David Priever, who searched for me and found Joe's Declaration of Intention, in which his name is definitely given as Joseph Dudley Levy.

It appears, then, that Joe changed his name some time between his declaration of intention to become a US citizen and 1930 when he was calling himself Joseph Lavell.

I first met my Uncle Joe in person in 1955 when he came to Jamaica for a visit. It had been a very long time since he had seen my father, his brother. I imagine that he knew my mother, since the Smedmores lived across the street from the Levy family on Beeston Street. In fact, when my uncle, Norman Dey Smedmore, emigrated to New York in 1918 he gave Joe's name on the manifest as the person he was going to in New York City. Joe's address at the time was 1121 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn. Although by now Joe was married he did not bring Alice with him, as she apparently did not like the idea of flying. I remember my Uncle Joe as being very American indeed in accent and behaviour. I know that my father was extremely happy to see him again after all that time.

In my next post I'll write about my visit to New York with my family, when we stayed for three days with Uncle Joe and Alice and got to know him better.

The Levy Family -- Coming to America

Of the four surviving children of Leopold and Alice Levy three went to the United States. My father, Michael, was the only one who remained in Jamaica, to take care of his mother who had been widowed in 1917. Michael joined the Civil Service in 1908 at the age of nineteen and remained there until his retirement at age sixty. Here is a view of the Governernment Buildings as they would have been in his time there.

Michael worked in the Administrator General's office, eventually becoming Trustee in Bankruptcy in 1948. This photo of him was taken inside the government offices.

After my father retired from the Civil Service he took another job, as his pension was not large enough to support the family, but that's another story ... For now I want to write about my aunt and uncles who did not remain in Jamaica but made a life for themselves in America.

The story of Jamaicans is one of movement away from Jamaica ... to other islands, to Central and South America, to the United States, to Britain and to Canada, always on the lookout for a better life, a better job, or perhaps just to get away. Just as Jamaica attracted all sorts of people from various parts of the world so too Jamaicans have left the island and settled elsewhere. In the 1900s they flocked to the United States, most of them to live in New York. On pages of the 1930 U.S. Federal Census one finds Jamaicans living together in groups in such boroughs as Manhattan.

The Ellis Island database is a wonderful source for this movement of people to the U.S. Another great source is the subscription website, Ancestry. I have used both to try to find information on my father's siblings. I have found his sister, Essie and his brother, Joseph, travelling to New York, but Leo, the other brother, continues to elude me. More of him later.

At this point I must explain that I did know Uncle Joe, who visited Jamaica in the 1950s and whom I visited with my family in 1960 when we left Jamaica to go to Canada. Unfortunately, at that time I wasn't particularly interested in family history research and didn't ask the questions I should have, so much of what I now know about my uncle Joe has been through research carried out some time after his death.

The same year that my grandfather Leopold died Joe left Jamaica to go to the U.S. The story I was told about why my father's siblings left Jamaica was this: my grandmother, Alice, was afraid that the younger boys would have to join up to fight in the first World War. (My father, apparently, was not eligible to join up because of some medical reason.) She wanted them to go the U.S. because America wasn't in the war. Joe arrived in New York in September 1917, but the U.S. had entered the war on April 6, 1917, so this story doesn't really make sense to me. At any rate, I found Joe in the Ellis Island database, travelling to New York on board the ss Catherine Cuneo, leaving Port Antonio on August 28th and arriving on September 5th. Here is what the first page of the ship's manifest looks like.

Under the column "Name and complete address of nearest relative of friend in country whence alien came" Joe gave his mother's name and this is how I knew that by 1917 she was living at 22 Beeston Street. On page two of the manifest, under the heading "Whether going to join a relative or frined...", Joe gave the name, "Mrs. Warner (friend), 346 Summer Avenue, Brooklyn, N.Y." I have no idea who this Mrs. Warner could be! So often the records we find produce more questions than answers.

In my next post I'll write about some of the other surprising things I learned about my uncle Joe.